The Antelope Wife (19 page)
R
OZIN FLIPS THROUGH
a pile of mail, two paper bags at her knees. One for glossy junk mail and one for plain envelopes and letter paper. Gakaabikaang insists that its citizens sort their business out, and Rozin does this with even more devotion than she used to before her husband created a toxic waste dump in the barn of innocent old people. A story that has been reported in the newspapers she recycles.
A letter with a handwritten address. BIA boarding school script, thinks Rozin. An elder. Indians of the boarding school era have beautiful handwriting—flowing, spikey, and precise. The capitals are rounded and tailed. Rozin looks at the letter and thinks: swollen fingers whacked by rulers and many tears made these letters. These are the well-formed and perfected small triumphs of shame. The name where there should be a return address is Jimmy Badger. The letter is addressed to Klaus.
Rozin opens it because Klaus is gone, and reads:
Bring her back to us. Her daughters are going crazy and are running through our men. They have broke up every marriage and punched out every wife. Our tribal leaders are again locking each other up and the school board is devouring the administration. Gangs are here, the drugs are getting harder, the drinking bloodier. Nobody stops at the gas station and the casino deal is stalled. Birds are falling from the sky. An eagle died in my yard. I have made its tail feathers into a white fan for the woman with the blue beads, the one you stole. Bring her back to us! Bring her back!
Rozin drops the letter on the table. That’s it. Cecille is right. History won’t let up. Sweetheart’s presence has meaning and from Jimmy Badger’s letter Rozin now understands that is true. If only the BIA had been more careful about teaching details like a return address! It seems Sweetheart Calico is throwing our world out of whack. She belongs where she was—the stamp is canceled Montana. Since Klaus stole her and brought her here, thinks Rozin, everything there and here has gone downhill. That carpet scam went bad. Klaus and Richard disappeared. I got happy with Frank, but the twins were spirited off by Sweetheart and I lost my job. Then I took them north and they got sick. Finally, they jump in Cecille’s car and end up here. At least they’re back in school. But we should figure out what to do with Sweetheart Calico.
It seems that Sweetheart doesn’t want Rozin to find her, because she won’t be found. She has stopped coming to the house since Rozin came back. That is because Sweetheart is busy stalking Klaus and Richard, just out of sight. When they fall asleep, she steals whatever they’ve rustled together in their day of foraging. She takes it all. The dog has run away to live with her, hunting rabbits in the melted underbrush and through the new spring yards. It’s not a bad way to live although it is sometimes so repetitious. Klaus and Richard walk to the same places, collect the same change, buy the same bottles, sleep curled in the same smelly mess of sleeping bags and blankets.
Sweetheart has two sleeping bags. She knows the most deserted hiding places. Finds a house. Creeps into the bag with the dog and both stay warm and also they have scored another old forsaken pizza. Inside the sleeping bag with pizza dog farts, Sweetheart sleeps deeply, happily, even profoundly. She is dreaming of the open spaces, of running and running. She is laughing with her daughters as they charge up and down the hills. She goes to visit Jimmy Badger in her dream and he blesses her with an eagle tail fan and tells how glad he is that she’s come home.
Ziigwan
As the days slowly grow warmer, Rozin rises earlier and earlier. She is looking for a job. It isn’t going well. She has moved back into her house and Frank keeps bringing by the unsold goodies at the end of every day. Rozin knows she can balloon up fast on day-old muffins, so sometimes she tries to go running with Cecille. The jogging suit Cecille wears, made out of the same silk as a parachute, bright yellow, flares up and down the street and over to the river, her route. With her hair in a ponytail and neat black ribbon, she is a fixated bee. Shadowboxing. Leaping. Posing with her hands cocked and her eyes steady. Man-eating tiger eyes. Irish-Anishinaabe masterpiece woman. Rozin sweats like mad as she bounces slowly along behind her cousin, feeling heavier and madder and more resentful of her joblessness and lack of power in the system. Perhaps I will go back to school, she thinks. Become a lawyer. Hit Richard up for child support. How would that work? You can’t hit up a man who has made himself into a wino. You can’t garnishee his panhandling take, but I would like to.
She works in the bakery sometimes, but only when Frank is busy. She doesn’t sit or have coffee or pass the time of day. Rozin handles the customers and cleans the glass counter and display case of their eternal fingerprints.
Still there are times Rozin rises even earlier, and in those blue morning hours, Frank teaches her everything he knows about the attractions of flours to yeasts to butters. He explains the temperatures that make them brown and rise. Rozin learns to skim with serious efficiency the bits of blackened dough from the Jacuzzi-sized deep fryer full of boiling fat and to run the whip cycle on the mixer that froths up lard and sugar. Her favorite part is to add the food coloring in drops. Instant red, blue, lavender. Killer frosting, whipped high.
All day, people stagger in from the tae kwan do school down the street, exhausted from Cecille’s workouts, craving butterfat icing and reflex-slowing caramel-fudge fritters. They have to touch the cases where these things are displayed on doilies. They press close to the delectables, breathe, smudge, cough the air full of predatory microorganisms. Rozin can see their instant relief, after they have paid. Opening the crinkly white bag, exposing sweet deep-fried dough, biting into the spot on the powdered bismarck that holds the squirt of cherry jelly, they sometimes give out a small involuntary moan.
The grandmas drive down to stay a week. Noodin comes into the shop wearing a pair of pink-beaded earrings that Rozin gave her. It is clear from the implacable set of her mouth and her blink at the sight of Frank that she is sneaking away for a jolt of sugar. She is small as ever and her face reminds Frank of one of those squashed-in little dogs. Soft round flat cheeks, heavy chin, a grim wide mouth. Her nose is pug round, brown as a knot of tobacco, and her eyes are dark and yielding with a kind of liquid mournfulness. Her big gaze sweeps over the cakes and cookies. The contents of the lighted case seem to her a tragic puzzle. She sighs over all the choices. She slowly opens her purse. And here’s where when Frank knows he is in trouble, not one word yet exchanged. Her little plastic snap purse is held together with a rubber band.
Those rubber-banded snap purses. Watch out, Frank thinks. You see an old lady slowly draw one forth and you know you are going to pay for her lunch and pay beyond that in ways more than money or time. No way you can spiritually afford to charge an old lady with a broken, old, green-plastic snap purse who has, in her pride, saved and used to close it a blue rubber band off a bunch of broccoli she bought to aid her slow digestion. No way you can charge her a dime. Even if she points at the biggest, puffiest, creamiest, most expensive piece of cake in the case you can’t charge her.
No way you can get out of marrying her daughter, either. Not that you want to.
“Please,” Frank says, sliding the piece of cake at her over the counter, already on a six-inch paper plate, with a plastic fork and napkin beside. “It’s on the house.” Grandma Noodin rears back as though suspicious. As though she has just recognized Frank.
“Frank,” she says, and already her snap purse has vanished.
“I’ve been hoping you would stop in.” Frank comes around the counter to sit down with her, intent on not letting her out of his sight. It is unseasonably hot, one of those wild April heat waves that tell you humans may not last on this planet. Frank has already closed the door and turned on the air-conditioning.
“Miigwech,” she growls. “What kind of cake is this?”
He tells her, by pulling out a chair and tidying the corner that he is going to try to keep her in. “This is my attempt at the world-renowed blitzkuchen.”
Grandma takes an immediate bite.
“Needs something.”
“What?” he asks.
Her face goes intent with thought, trying to discover what spice or ingredient the cake is missing. He watches her sit back, solid as a gray lake rock, chewing in meditation. In the window, looking out as she slowly licks the schlag from her plastic fork, she gives a secret little smile. A familiar expression from up north. Frank is the one suspicious of her now. She’s toying with him, this tiny bulldog lady.
She knows, but she won’t tell.
“So Nookomis, I’ve actually been looking all over for you,” Frank starts again.
“Oh?” She opens her eyes in what may even be real surprise. “Good thing I came in here then. What did you need?”
She asks Frank, right out, what he wants of her. Just like that. And just like that, faced with the question, he asks not for permission to marry Rozin, which requires many gifts and a longer buildup, especially since Rozin is still married; no, he asks Noodin for the secret ingredient.
“Secret of what?”
“This cake.”
Noodin looks down at the crumbs.
“You know the story,” she says. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you then.”
Frank holds his breath.
“The cake was baked by a man afraid for his life. He put his fear into the cake.”
The revelation sets Frank back in his chair. If he were to make the cake, say, as he was misdiagnosed with cancer or if someone held a gun to his head only it was loaded with blanks . . . or if you desperately loved a woman and were trying to think how to marry her when suddenly her husband showed up . . .
Noodin makes significant eye contact with Frank, tips an imaginary bottle delicately to her lips. And there he is.
F
RANK DOESN’T RECOGNIZE
Rozin’s husband at first, for Richard Whiteheart Beads is saggy-skinned, drooping like a week-old helium balloon, and he is sick, with a bruise the green of old cooked liver on his cheek, and puffy eyelids. Around his head a frayed red bandanna. A U of MN Golden Gophers sweatshirt from the Salvation Army with its sleeves chopped off and the gopher just a faded ghost gopher. Shorts sagging underneath a watermelon-tight paunch. Shorts held up with rope. Flapping tennies and no socks. He stands before the counter barely holding himself upright and then he turns. Directly, for he knows, he fixes Frank with such a stare, like looking down into the bottom of a dry well. His mouth opens. A powerful wave of sour breath hits Frank as he croaks three times like a raven, “Cawg . . . cawg . . . cawg . . . ,” then stops, gulps dry, and looks even harder at Frank and croaks in a terrible whisper.
“Nibi . . .”
Wheeling backward, whirling his arms like a suddenly light scarecrow tossed by a wind in the air, Richard stagger-skips backward to the door. Frank leans toward him in a tangle of conflicted feeling, but he is out, into the street. Frank, Grandma, and Klaus watch his runaway figure round the corner and vanish.
“That was quick.” Noodin returns to her cake, presses up the remaining crumbs with the tines of her fork.
“Aawww . . . we just wanted . . . a drink. A drink of water.”
Klaus is still standing in the middle of the store. He voice is wracked, bone-dry. Klaus tries to speak more words, tapping his throat. He’s in an even worse state than Richard. He sways back and forth making small mewling noises of thirst.
Frank steps up to Klaus and catches him before he can pitch down. He pulls Klaus’s arm over his own shoulder and drags him back into the bakery. Once behind the swinging steel doors, Frank rolls Klaus gently out on a stainless-steel bread table. Makes him drink a cup of water sip by sip. Turns down the lights. Frank takes an apron or two off the wall hooks and drapes them across his cousin’s arms and chest and bare legs.
Rozin walks in with Cally and Deanna. Frank can tell from their faces that they missed seeing Richard, and he’s relieved. The girls’ eyes go big when they see Klaus sprawled out on the bread table.
“Major disinfection needed there,” says Rozin.
“Klaus needs rest,” says Frank to the girls, his big face steady. “You come on out to the front. Your uncle needs to sleep.”
For an hour or so, Frank works out front, doing nothing more than checking the ovens in the bakery, the specific one in which he’s got the next blitzkuchen. Fear! What about frustration? From time to time, he makes sure that his relative is still peacefully passed out. Frank mops down the entry floor and even goes outside and sweeps off the spotless sidewalk. Rozin watches him standing there gazing out at street life, massive from behind, casting a shadow around his feet like a little black pool. She blinks, thinks maybe a dog pauses, just for a moment, out of the searing noon sun. The hot and sticky day is the reason Klaus became desperate enough to throw himself into the entry of the bakery shop.
“They don’t come here much,” says Frank when he steps back in.
Rustling, groans. Frank starts forward but the steel door barges open. Klaus has thrown it wide. He is staring at them like a confused scraggly coyote who doesn’t know how it got into this body. Or understand why his clothes are covered with filth or what to do with the feet that can’t steady the rest of him. His hands reach out, shaking, his face twists like a rag.
“Nibi,” he cries, and staggers forward. Frank pours from a plastic pitcher, then gives Klaus the pitcher. Klaus drops the pitcher.
“Oops.”
Sweetheart Calico slides in and stands behind Klaus as he staggers forward, and in her eyes there is something Rozin can’t name at first. Not kindness, not love. Maybe a savage mercy.
It is really painful when we self-sabotage
, her look says to Klaus.
I know where you are at
. Sweetheart grabs his arm. Turns him. In her hand there is a plastic cup of water. Stumbling and reeling, he tries to accept. His hand won’t cooperate. He swipes toward the cup and misses. Holds his elbow with the other arm and concentrates. It takes Frank sitting him down on the floor and crouching next to him, holding the cup to his lips.